Rami Khouri: Tunisia heralds a long battle for Arab reform
[The writer is a syndicated columnist and director of the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut.]
Last week’s dramatic overthrow of the Tunisian regime headed by former President Zein el-Abedeen Ben Ali will not provoke immediate street revolutions across the Arab world. While it will almost certainly inspire renewed agitation for change in many sectors of Arab society, it will also trigger pre-emptive moves for containment by the established regimes. I suspect Tunisia will be seen in retrospect more like the Solidarity movement in Poland that sparked a decade-long process of slow transformation in the Soviet satellites, than the fall of the Berlin Wall that ushered in revolutions across eastern Europe.
To understand the Arab world you have to appreciate it comprises a wide variety of social conditions and styles of leadership, each with varying degrees of domestic legitimacy. The region’s leaders also have a proven ability to use force or unveil pre-emptive liberalisations and socio-economic subsidies to remain in power. Notwithstanding the extraordinary scenes of popular protest in Tunisia last week, powerful grievances among Arab citizens have traditionally been countered by strong innate conservative forces in society. This is why so few mass protests and regime overthrows of this kind have occurred in the modern Arab world.
In reality, there are two Arab worlds. The first comprises the wealthy Arab energy producers in the Gulf with small populations, where paternalistic and tribal welfarism keep most citizens materially comfortable and politically docile. The rest of the Arab world – some 320m of the 350m total Arab population – closely mirrors the Tunisian profile as a stressed landscape defined by socio-economic pressures, widening disparities between haves and have-nots, environmental degradation, considerable political tensions and autocratic rule anchored by domestic security agencies...
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Last week’s dramatic overthrow of the Tunisian regime headed by former President Zein el-Abedeen Ben Ali will not provoke immediate street revolutions across the Arab world. While it will almost certainly inspire renewed agitation for change in many sectors of Arab society, it will also trigger pre-emptive moves for containment by the established regimes. I suspect Tunisia will be seen in retrospect more like the Solidarity movement in Poland that sparked a decade-long process of slow transformation in the Soviet satellites, than the fall of the Berlin Wall that ushered in revolutions across eastern Europe.
To understand the Arab world you have to appreciate it comprises a wide variety of social conditions and styles of leadership, each with varying degrees of domestic legitimacy. The region’s leaders also have a proven ability to use force or unveil pre-emptive liberalisations and socio-economic subsidies to remain in power. Notwithstanding the extraordinary scenes of popular protest in Tunisia last week, powerful grievances among Arab citizens have traditionally been countered by strong innate conservative forces in society. This is why so few mass protests and regime overthrows of this kind have occurred in the modern Arab world.
In reality, there are two Arab worlds. The first comprises the wealthy Arab energy producers in the Gulf with small populations, where paternalistic and tribal welfarism keep most citizens materially comfortable and politically docile. The rest of the Arab world – some 320m of the 350m total Arab population – closely mirrors the Tunisian profile as a stressed landscape defined by socio-economic pressures, widening disparities between haves and have-nots, environmental degradation, considerable political tensions and autocratic rule anchored by domestic security agencies...